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Issue 340: Friends in code places

Personally, we think we could all use some coding friends in this day and age. For instance, good friends give you a reality check when you need it most. In this issue, some of our buddies are here to give us a reality check on the state of software development. We sit down with Snowflake’s Umesh Unnikrishnan to break down why the future of dev is full-stack and how enterprise software is adapting to autonomous agents. We welcome back VoidZero’s Evan You and Cloudflare’s Dane Knecht to discuss Cloudflare acquiring VoidZero, proving that good friendships can keep major open-source ecosystems like Vite alive. Plus Stack’s very own Michael Foree teaches us about context engineering in the latest No Dumb Questions.

If you’re looking for something fun to do with your friends, we’ve got stories from around the web for inspiration. You could, for instance, explore one of the 2,435 castles around the world with them. Or find some deep sea coral together. Or port DOOM onto a custom CPU. And what would friendship be without some occasional tough love? No one gives out tough love better than our Stack community, who are sharing their knowledge on everything from bad teaching practices to seeing in the dark to shared memories. We have all of those links and more ready for you down below, bestie. No need to thank us. I mean, what are friends for?

From the blog

No Dumb Questions: What is the AI bottleneck? How does context engineering fix it?

In this No Dumb Questions, Stack's Director of Data Science Michael Foree teaches Phoebe about AI context, context engineering, and what she can do to become a better context engineer.

Partnerships can keep open source sustainable

Ryan welcomes VoidZero’s Evan You and Cloudflare’s Dane Knecht back to the show to discuss Cloudflare’s recent acquisition of VoidZero and what it means for JavaScript development, how partnerships like theirs can help open-source projects stay maintained and sustainably monetized, and how Cloudflare’s distributed systems are helping to improve developer experience in Vite and beyond.

The future of development is full-stack

Live from Snowflake Summit, Ryan talks with Snowflake’s Head of Developer Experience Umesh Unnikrishnan about the industry-wide shift from “vibe coding” for quick prototypes to agentic engineering for enterprise-ready software, how enterprises can scale governance with guardrails like human-in-the-loop approval and control layers that go beyond the underlying LLM, and why Umesh predicts all developers will become someday become full-stack builders.

Not Every Engineer Gets to Work on What's Next

At Raytheon, work on advanced technologies that shape tomorrow's capabilities.

Interesting questions

Do countries pay for emergency firefighting assistance?

But who pays if there's a fire in international waters?

Can memory be defined as a universal principle of life rather than a simple function of brains?

If by "memory" you mean "shows the effects of change," then sure, buddy, why not.

Plagiarism or just cheating?

A question from the least-reasonable instructor at your university.

Is darkness transparent?

Is this a zen koan?

Links from around the web

Long presumed dead, a thriving coral reef is discovered in West Africa

So that's where Nemo was.

Running DOOM on our custom CPU and going viral

But can DOOM run on a vape?

Explore 2,435 castles, fortresses & palaces worldwide

Odysseus would have made it home earlier if he had this.

Claude is not a compiler

Has anyone tried vibe-compiling?

Onboard, organize, and bring your team up to speed in a jiffy. Try Stack Internal.